Guy is an exponential growth lever, as simple as that.
And for for somebody to be overly cautious and risk averse
now to say, no, I'm not going to do that.
We'll wait and see what you know Fred does next door.
Good luck with that. I don't expertly be alive in two
to five years. Welcome to The Kingdom's
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Breakthrough, starts here. Music licensing reimagined.
Your life, ladies and gentlemen, you are once again welcome to
the kingdom's forecast. And today I have with me
fighting out of Hampshire, England like welcome, Joe.
Joan Rather, Joan, the customer service revolutionizer.
DRS. How are you, Joan?
Hi, Adam Minder, nice to meet you.
I'm very well. Thank you very well.
Wow, wow, wow. For a minute there, you know,
you're always thinking I'm a fighter now, you know, But of
course you're fighting a life like I don't.
I know you are a philosopher like myself, but what do you
think about the concept of life being a fight?
Life being a battle place? Well, that's an interesting one
to start with life as a battle place.
I'd like to see it as a journey, a journey of discovery, self
discovery and other discovery. And you know, we are, I'd say
complex beings. Maybe comprehensive beings is a
better term given that we have lots of intelligences and we
might talk about artificial intelligence at some stage.
But of course. We will always talk about
artificial intelligence. We will always do that.
Why? Guess what?
Guess what I am, I am AI because my first name is Atimala.
My middle name is Sasima. So by default, my my nieces are
AI. I guess my, my parents, my
parents had an incline knowing that this guy is going to this
guy is going to be an AI evangelist in the future.
So let us let us align him. So you cannot talk to me without
talking about AI? Please.
That was a prophecy come true. There we go.
There you go. So AI, please, please talk to me
about it. We'll get to that, I'm sure.
But you know, AI is only another technology, let's put it that.
And as I would always say, and anybody who's seen me followed
me on LinkedIn, my mantra is that it's all about service.
Life is all about service, frankly, because you know,
service is about people and people about each other and
about community and about love and care and support.
And it's no different in the business world.
We just shy away from different languages and different words.
But service is about caring for each other, whether they be your
customers, your employees, your other stakeholders, whomever
they might be. So.
Me life is all about service. I love that, you know, very,
very much aligns with my philosophy.
It it just feels as though you have been eavesdropping on my
previous, you know, conversations with guests.
And of course, my my previous episodes are anybody that
follows this podcast very closely would have heard me say
multiple times that the greatest leaders in life are servant
leaders. You know, service to humanity is
a privilege, right? So.
It is. Look at the greatest leaders,
Jesus Christ, Prophet Muhammad, you know, come down to
contemporary leaders Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Ronald
Reagan, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama.
Name any any major leader. These guys are all 7 leaders for
you to be great in life you need to serve but I.
Agree. I agree.
People, people don't get it. And it's hard, you know, let's
not be, let's not be naive about it.
To serve is actually probably the highest calling, right?
But it's and it takes because it takes levels off honesty takes
levels of authenticity and sacrifice.
And in our day and age, a lot of people don't want to make
sacrifice and sacrifice is hard. Who would want to make that?
But there are times when you're called to, and I challenge
people when they, and I've heard in business life people say, Oh,
well, it's all about servant leaders and we want our, you
know, top people to be servant leaders and etcetera, etcetera.
And I'll ask the question, well, yeah, that's fine.
But does that mean that you'll put yourself out of a job first
before any of your employees? Because that's the sacrifice of
a servant leader for me. You know, be careful of using
that term about yourself, particularly because it's a very
high calling and I don't generally allow people to get
away with late using it as the latest buzzword anyway.
We don't. And of course, you know, we, we
love to, we love to digress, we love to swim deep, we love to
deep dive. And of course, you know, in, in
a lot of the, the deep knowledge oceans.
And that is what this platform is about.
It is an educational podcast and our two main goals are to
educate and to inspire. That is what we set out to
achieve on here. So you talked about life being a
journey and your own life has actually truly been a journey.
You know, I look at that extraordinary 35 year journey
from engineering to executive leadership.
What was that pivotal moment that shaped your mission to
revolutionize service excellence?
Yeah, that's an interesting 1. I think I was, you know, I've
been, when I look back, it's easy to see when you look back.
I think sometimes when you're in the middle of it, you might be
aware of it, but you don't generally get to have the big
perspective. So 35 years later, I, I get the
opportunity to reflect on a journey where actually I was
placed, if you like, in the world of service and operations.
So if you cut me through and through, you'll find a, a guy of
service and operations in the business world.
I love business. I love leadership of business.
And I suppose that formed my early thinking that actually,
you know, no rocket science here, but we're all about
serving customers. It's an obvious one, but I I'm
staggered at how many organizations still seem to
forget that or not put that front and centre and they get
diverted, Especially in these days of technology because it's
easy to go do things and do things with technologies and
activities and all sorts of things and actually sometimes
forget that it's all about the customer and how they journey
with you as well. Exactly so.
I realized maybe I had the opportunity to move from being a
full time executive employee. I was chief operating officer of
an operational technology company that did vehicle
tracking. And this was a while ago.
And I had the opportunity to move out of the corporate full
time world and move into the consulting world and the
freelance world. And I started.
I had intent to set up my own business at the time,
butitwas.com.com era and people only ever wanted to invest
in.comsinthe.com booth. So I set up acoupleof.com
organisations and companies, one of the first jobs boards for
people with MBAs because I was halfway through my MBA at the
time and it seemed like the web was great for if it was good for
anything. It was good for putting people
in touch with each other and matching.
Simply matching one side and the other using database.
Web-based enabled database matching.
So I'd set that up and yeah, it did OK.
It was never going to bring in the millions that perhaps I
wanted. But frankly, I wasn't prepared
to seek the investment, the big investment tickets that were
around at the time, in large part because you'd have to sell
your soul really, and probably your family and your home and
everything at the same time. And I wasn't prepared or were
able to do that at the time. But it led me into a different
world, a world of freelance and consulting.
Even though, and I'll let you into a little secret here, I had
sworn to myself that I never wanted to be a.
Why you don't want to be like me?
25 years later, having been a consultant on and off, I've also
been back in full time corporate employment on and off.
And I guess we say these days I had and still have a bit of a
portfolio career, which is lovely because it's about
variety. One of the reasons I came out of
corporate life at the time was because my my first daughter was
born and I wanted time to spend with her as she was growing up.
And then my second daughter was born.
My second daughter actually took us into the world of complex
special needs. So her world was very, very
different. And my wife and I need a lot of
time to attend lots of medical consultations and lots of
meetings and all sorts of things.
So I had the the blessing and the privilege to spend time with
both my girls as they were growing up.
And so I found myself in the world of freelance. the IT guys
came and found me and they said, you know something about
service, Come and run our IT service management projects,
which I did for the likes of BP and Vodafone and Diageo and
Unilever and many of the big guys and thoroughly enjoyed it,
thoroughly enjoyed it and learned a lot.
And this is what I always say to people, you know, everywhere you
go, the opportunity is to learn. To learn.
All right, and. To say that you need to learn
before you can earn and learn and expand your earning
potentials. That's very true, of course.
So I spent 1213 years or so freelance project and program
management in the world of IT and technologies after doing 10
years worth of corporate life in service and operations
leadership, as I say, leaving as Chief Operating officer of a
medium sized organization. And I then got pulled back into
the world of consulting. I headed up service management
consulting for Capgemini in the UKI went and joined one of the
big IT software providers. So it's now for a couple of
years, but I've always maintained close contact with
clients that I've worked with because we were talking before,
weren't we, that human relationship?
Again, people do business with people and generally people like
people. It's kind of the way that we
work. So the challenge these days, and
we'll get onto it, the challenge these days in the world of
artificial intelligence is an interesting one.
And because I've been in the world of technology, but always
had that focus on service and operations, it got me to a point
where I thought, you know what? I my reflection on 2530 odd
years of of work in that environment, technology enabled
service offers me a particular perspective and learned
experience that I can now turn around and offer back to
organizations, be they large, medium or small.
And I work with large clients, but equally so, I'm working and
I want to work with more medium sized organizations, more scale
up organizations, the folks that really can make a difference
quickly because they can make quick decisions, they get it
quickly. They're happy to bring alongside
them some expertise. One of the ways I do that these
days is not to charge high ticket price consulting rates.
But what I've done is I've packaged up the 35 years worth
of experience into a course, a coaching and advisory program
that wraps around the course so that the smaller, the medium
sized organizations get the chance to really exploit my
learnings that I've learned in all those large organizations.
But now packaged up into a framework that gives them a
toolkit and a way forward to help them accelerate their
growth. Be it revenue, be it new lines
of business, be it operating costs and reducing costs, be it
reducing risk, whatever it might be.
The Customer Service Revolutionizer is the framework
that I now use to support organizations in their business
outcomes. You know service LED businesses
right? Will never go into extinction as
long as the human risk exists. Agra and like I said previously,
services are privileged. I do have a first degree in
economics and I remember speaking with somebody yesterday
and we were talking about money, the concept of money as a store
value. Money is a store value to
individuals, to entities, to corporations, and they will
exchange that value with a person or another entity if
there is a perceived exchange of value.
And that is what you have been able to do successfully.
Package value, offer that value and you get value in return.
Absolutely. But it seems like a lot of
individuals have not been able to clock that methodology.
But based off your experience, like what does service LED
business growth really mean in today's experience economy and
why should every executive care about it?
We are all experts in the world of customer service, are we not?
We know when we've been served well, we enjoy it, we like it,
we're grateful for it, it brings out the best in US and we
usually go back for more. So there's a really simple
business model here that says serve your customer well in a
truly outstanding manner and you'll just get repeat business
from the customer. It's the most obvious one.
There is the notion, of course, McKinsey did the study ages ago,
didn't they, that the cost of finding new customers is
significantly higher than actually just increasing the
revenue you get from existing customers by serving them even
better, right? And working with them as true
partners these days. Because if you serve them well,
then let's put it in business language, their satisfaction
increases. I might say, therefore, your NPS
scores go up. If their satisfaction improves
and increases, then they buy more from you.
The retention goes up. They become advocates for you
and your I. Was waiting for that.
I was waiting for that because that word of mouth referral and
advertisement is the most effective form of advertisement
and marketing. Simple.
Yeah, yeah. And and so, you know, there's a
they, they stay partnering with you in what we call the customer
journey, the lifetime journey, right.
So I'm bemused. I'm often bemused when I go into
organizations and I look at the mediocre or poor levels of
service that they actually offer to their customer base.
Now there may be lots of different reasons for that,
right? Not least, let me give you a
few. Over the years and decades,
let's say companies have become highly fragmented.
Now for me, a highly fragmented organization cannot join up to
what I call it's end to end service delivery, which should
match the customer journey. So the consequence of that is
that you and I as a customer, when we're trying to deal with
our suppliers, we fall between internal silos, internal
departments, internal systems, internal ways of doing things.
And I go, why do I care anything about your internal
organization? I don't.
I don't care about your technology.
I don't care about your solutions, your systems, your
projects. I don't.
I only care about the quality of service that you are delivering
for me and the value that I get for it.
So stay focused please, on ensuring A seamless,
frictionless customer journey. Now again, one of the big things
that organizations forget service starts the moment a
prospective customer engages with your customer, with your
business, IE these days that's either your website and or your
social media accounts. You don't get to interact with
the prospective customer until they are 70% through the buying
cycle. In many respects, this is all
borne out by current research, right?
The world of the customer buyer power has changed massive
massively without great technologies that we have.
So organizations are forgetting a lot of the basic principles of
how to serve customers well. And it's not about technologies,
it's not about internal departments.
There are too many silos and fragmentation.
They may have run voice of the customer programs, they may
have, you know employed the best suppliers.
They may have done all sorts of great things.
But if they are not joining up the end to end customer journey,
then they're not delivering great service.
Absolutely. Is that my turn?
Definitely, definitely. And I'm quite curious,
especially given the privilege that you've had to, to work
across a lot of these Titans, you know, the likes of BP,
that's British Petroleum, Vodafone.
Diageo and, you know, helping them reimagine the possible when
it comes to customer service, you know, but peeking from your
wealth of experience, what has been the most surprising lesson
that you've learnt, You know, working across these diverse
sectors, you know, although they are diverse, but customer
service is a common denominator because that is what business is
set out to do. Every business has a customer.
What is that surprise that you've had across part in terms
of the customer service despite the diversity of the sectors?
Honestly, I think it's in some of the the inference that I
spoke about earlier on by way of the large organization not being
joined together in the customer journey.
So many organisations say, Oh yeah, yeah, we do customer
journey mapping and they understand to some degrees how
their customer moves through their organization.
And they have great people, great processes, great
technologies, but they don't bring them together to actually
deliver that seamless journey. And nobody tests well enough the
customer journey before they quote UN quote, put things live
right. They they, they close.
The segregation, especially with those larger scale enterprises.
Yeah, yeah. Now, you know, I'd say a lot of
this has to do with leadership, frankly, because for me, a great
business leader has to see the organization from end to end,
has to truly understand the journey that customer goes
through from end to end and that journey.
That that is right from, you know, like your purchase order
down to your payables, right? You have to have that same
synergy. Across board, but you see my my
argument also, Adam only is that service starts when the
prospective customer starts to engage with your organization,
right? How well does your website offer
them the information that they need to make quick decisions?
How well does it give them build their trust of your organization
and its capability and how you will treat them if they give you
money and become your customer? How well do you give them that
warm feeling? Because we still, many of us
make decisions based on our emotions, and then we seek the
facts and the figures to justify and substantiate our emotional
decision. Because we're human beings.
That's how you very. True emotions a lot of times.
Trump's logic for. Human beings.
Now here's the interesting thing of that.
And many of the organizations I've worked for and with forgets
this. This is an important lesson that
I've learned. The buzzword over the last 1015
years has been customer experience.
And I get it, I get it. We all and because that ties
into the emotion. So let's unpick this a little
bit, right? What we're saying is that when I
feel good about the product or service that I've just bought
and consumed, then I will usually go back because it was
great and it made me feel good. And that's all.
And we all want to be made to feel good and feel that we're
getting good value for money out of whatever it is we've bought,
whether it's a business to business product.
Service. Or whether it's a business to
consumer thing, whether it's a restaurant we've gone to or a
hotel or whatever it might be, right?
We all are human beings. We all want to feel that we've
got value for money. And it made me feel good.
I get it. Exactly.
You know, I'll give you the I'll give you this.
People don't remember what you did to them.
People remember how you made them feel.
Correct. Absolutely.
Here's the But many organizations think they can
control experience, but experience, by definition is
something that the individual goes through.
It's an external variable, not an internal variable.
Correct, it's nothing that you can deliver.
You can, however, deliver great service and a great product if
you like, that delivers the value with the service wrapper
around it, right? So the organization can actually
only deliver a great product and service combination.
And I hope that it's got everything good enough to
deliver the great thought for you then to experience it in a
fantastic way. Because you and I can go to the
self same restaurant, for example, eat the self same food
and menu, but actually come out with a different experience
altogether. Because it's very individual.
And it's about emotions and all sorts of things that might have
been going on in my life that day and your life that day.
Lots of stuff that the company cannot control.
Exactly. So my challenge to the
leadership is why are you so focused on trying to deliver
what you think is the Holy Grail, which is customer
experience? When you ignore the outstanding
service that you have to deliver to your customer, you pay lip
service to that. Some organizations actually
think service is still an afterthought.
They think it comes after the sale.
They might even have a department still called customer
service. And you go, wow, Gryce, have we
not learned anything in these last 25 years?
Have we not learned that life is a is all about service?
As I said right at the beginning, my mantra, it's all
about service, whether you're serving a prospective customer,
an existing customer, a customer who might choose to go somewhere
else. It's all about a human
relationship. So there's lots of lessons.
I hope I'm not boring you and your your listeners.
There's lots of lessons over those 35 years that I've
packaged up into hopefully an easily consumable framework that
because again, you see, the other thing is my career's been
about implementation, not about theory, right?
Yeah, I've done the theory. I've done my MBA, I did my
electronics degree. I've built on that.
I used those. But I always loved business and
I always loved service and operations.
So I've always used what I've learned, but I've tried to help
clients implement it to make a real difference to their
organization and their customers because as you said, it's all
about the value that the customer gets at the end of the
day, that's the outcome that you want to achieve.
So you won't be surprised to hear that kind of the last
module, if you like, in my framework is all focused on the
customer outcomes and the business outcomes and staying
100% focused on that all the way through any transformation
programs, any AI programs, whatever it might be, you have
to stay focused on the outcomes and the value it's delivering.
And so my my career has been all about implementation and that's
what I bring to my client organizations that I work with.
There is a not to unpack here. That's one of the things that
jumped at me, you know, was you talking about your MBA?
And I love the MBA program. I do have an MBA myself.
And I'm quite grateful that I did have some work experience
before delve it into doing an MBA.
It helps you to get a perspective of the things you're
learning and that also aligns with your dissecting of the
difference between theory and practice.
That is, you don't appreciate what you're taught in an MBA
program if you don't have that element of practice under the
practice experience. And you cannot buy that
experience. You need to earn it.
So he, he, he also talk about AI and AI, something that is so,
so, so dear to my heart. Aside aside from me sharing the
same initials in AI, but I have practically use AI to build my
own personal organizations, you know, from scratch to something
building even this podcast platform.
We're probably about 18 months old and we've already gained a
lot of traction globally. You know, it's beautiful the,
the kind of, you know, quality of conversations we've been able
to build, you know, the quality of guests we've been able to
assemble Many thanks to a vision, right, and a mission
that is assisted by AI. Yeah.
Thankfully, you are going to be episode 100.
How about and celebration? How about that AI and I, I'm not
shy about it, right? I, I do have a gifted IQ and IQ
are both 130, but I still leverage on AI, you know, for a
lot of the things that would do the production, the editing, the
marketing, the street team. Yeah, and.
It is phenomenal. It's beautiful to see what we've
been able to do with AI, accomplished with AI, right?
It's just the future. Not talking about AI.
There are a lot of people would I say, I think I just identify
like a generational wars because I'm a millennial, right?
I feel stuck between the Gen. Z's, you know, and the
Generation X and baby boomers, you know, in the conversation
for AI and adopting it. But I just see it's, it's a
wave. It's a tsunami wave.
It's either you go with it or you, you get carried away, you
know, by it. But a very big concern is the
area of empathy, right when it comes to AI and of course, in
terms of like beauty and tomorrow's service delivery
functions, right? I like for us to deep dive into
that cotton edge, you know, Speaking of the cotton edge,
right when it when it comes to AI in that service based R or or
service delivery rather, you know, you are currently leading
the charge. You are a pacesetter.
You're a pioneer in our agent time and for me to you, it's a
very, very big appreciation of your expertise, your experience,
and of course that wealth of knowledge and effort that you're
putting in in this space. So having being that person,
that light in the darkness in our generation, leading this
charge towards AI assisted consultancy and emphasis on the
assistance, right? Because I always say that A is
here to be an assistant. AI is not here to be the
decision maker. Humans first, AI next.
And that's the title of one of my episodes, you know, with Mark
Andrews, an AI expert in America, right?
You know, that AI assistant consultancy.
How do you see AI reshaping the service delivery space?
You know, in terms of practical and real world use cases and
ways? Well, it is massive opportunity,
I would say to really spearhead the quality of service that gets
delivered to an organization by making it much more effective
and or more efficient for the organization at the same time.
Because look, for the last 1520 years, right, We've all grown up
with mobile apps on our phones that allow us to do all sorts of
things, order food, get it delivered.
Order. Order our flights, our holidays,
find a job and so on. All enabled by amazing
technology, courtesy of Steve Jobs and many others, of course,
but his pioneering skills and vision I think to bring some of
this technology to reality. And so we've benefited from
that. And so in the world of B to C,
it's an obvious one in the in the consumer world, but even the
world of business to business, more of us because human beings
generally still at the moment at least run the organizations and
work in the organizations. So we would like many of our
services within the organization and our collaboration with other
people in the organization, our colleagues, our other teams and
so on to be much more effective and much more efficient and to
use various buzzwords to be much more digitally transformed to be
enabled through better technologies.
So even when we engage with our suppliers as a consumer, we
expect much more mobile enabled customer service, customer
engagement that allows us to do things at the drop of a hat.
We just do. We've grown up that way and
that's what we expect and there's nothing wrong with that.
We have an insatiable appetite for better and better service
and a nicer and warmer and friendlier and you know, better
feeling from our interactions with our suppliers.
So to my point, right at the beginning, I'm amazed at how
many organizations don't deliver the great outstanding service
that they need to so. Emphasis on need to.
Need to, yes, need to. That's absolutely right.
And again, to you know that point, right, the customer
should be working inside the camp with the organization who
is trying to serve them because that's the best way of
understanding your customers needs and wants and wishes and
how things change you. You need to be partnering with
your customers who need to be helping you develop and deliver
your new products and services as you bring them to market as
well. And if you're not doing that,
you're missing a trick in this day and age.
So AI will now have the massive opportunity of transforming and
automating many of those interactions.
But there's an important point which says you should let your
customer decide how they would like to be served, whether they
want to be served using a chat bot or a video agent or an AI
avatar or whomever it might be. Whatever newfangled technology
AI brings to market, an AI agent, you should ask your
customer 1st and not just impose it on them.
Because if you impose it on them, then you know, many
customers actually don't want to adopt that Channel just yet.
Some are at different stages of technological maturity, let's
put it that way. An adoption.
Absolutely right. And you've got to treat your
customer like an individual, like a real person.
Because customers are always right.
Yeah, they're always right. Yeah, most of the time the the
inference of it is fair enough, right?
The nuance is right. Pays the bills at the end of the
day, so. But AI now offers organisations
the massive opportunity to make things much more streamlined and
efficient. But they must do so carefully
through the customer life cycle so as not to not not to really
upset the customer relationship simply.
Because I like that upset. I'm using my words really
carefully, I don't want to. I love that, you know, because
that, that that's a word I use often.
You know, I, I tell people I am the most authentic human being
walking the surface of this Earth, right?
And I am very easy to upset and very easy to please.
So, so you, you pick what you want, right?
I'm easy to please, easy to upset.
And I noticed that, you know, customers are actually very,
very sensitive, you know? Yeah, customers are easy to to
upset and interestingly easy to please as well.
So let's take the issue of right, let's take the issue of
AI. Now, I, I am not a naysayer.
I love the technology. I love the technology.
I've been in the world of technology all my working life.
So I you have. You have no choice but to love
AI because I am AI. However, however, however, as
always with every technological implementation, remember I said
my world is about implementation.
It needs to be done really carefully and with the.
Season carefully. Yeah.
And with your at the same time, you don't just throw technology
into the customer service center or the contact center or the
marketing channels or the virtual agents or whatever it
might be, right? Don't just throw technology at
your customer because invariably it doesn't work first time.
It only works so far. And then it's hugely frustrating
because the technology, you haven't given it a way out and a
way to interact, connect up the human to human and get itself
out of the way. So, you know, you need to do it
very, very carefully. But the world of AI is just
transforming things before our eyes.
I mean, the fact that you and I can actually clone ourselves.
And who knows whether these two people on this podcast are
actually real. Are we?
This is this is guys, guys, this is this is AI and that is JD.
That's right. We are real at this moment in
time. We are.
But hey, we are going into worlds that are fascinating, are
amazing, present, lots of opportunity.
But we must always remember it's not about AI, it's not about
technology. It is still.
It is still about service. It is still about how you serve
your customer and your employees and everybody else, right?
It's not about the AI. It's just another technology.
So in using AI, again, I say to many of the organizations that
I'm working with, be very strategic in what you're trying
to do with the capability that is now placed in your hands.
Exactly. Very careful.
Very careful as well, because we know like every technological
innovation in the hands of bad actors, it will take you into
very bad places in the hand. Power corrupts, and absolute
power corrupts absolutely. Correct.
Absolutely. And we know that we're living it
on a daily basis and we see cyber problems and threats
everywhere. AI is just going to
exponentialize that it really is.
So, you know, one of the things that I, I try and teach my, my
daughters as they're growing up is to think critically and to
discern very carefully the information, be it textual or
video or audio or however it's presented to you.
Just step back a little bit for a minute and engage brain,
because we still have a human brain to kind of, you know,
question and just clarify for yourself whether this is real,
whether it's true, whether it's something you want to take on.
And as the boundaries blur between human and artificial
intelligence, that's going to become harder and harder.
And, you know, we need to support and encourage and
challenge our younger generations as they come
through, as well as to how to discern carefully for themselves
and think critically for themselves.
You know, I appreciate something you are talking about and I
would love to, but I say come in and summarize this beautiful
message of yours and I will summarize it in this way.
Customer centric or customer centered service delivery, That
is how I summarize it. You know the customer has to be
at the center of your decision making when it comes to the
service delivery. Simple.
I was reading an article yesterday.
I'm currently unable to to pull up that article.
But basically that article was talking about how we tend to
celebrate the big AI successes, the big AI tech companies, the
big AI solutions. Well, we don't tend to realize
that there have also been big AI, you know, failures.
Perhaps, yeah. There have been ex Google
employees, ex Apple executives that have you come up with
certain companies with AI solutions, but these companies
have gone under why? And when I study your beautiful
body of work and apply it to the why, it's very simple.
You have to put the customer at the center of any technological
solution you're bringing in. And like you rightly said, AI is
just another technology. It is very, very important to
identify customer pin points and the customer pin points are
worth determine what AI solution that you come up with in order
to enhance something you spoke about passionately efficiency of
customer service delivery. The customer is the one who
determines how you serve them accurately said absolutely.
And if the customer is the one that determines that the
customer would ask for a certain, you know, service
methodologies, certain, you know, service requirements.
And that is where you introduce AI in order to enhance the
efficiency of that service delivery.
You do not just, you know, impose AI on your customers, you
absolutely bring in AI to assist you to meet that customer
pinpoint in a seamless and synergized and efficient way.
And that's simple. And that's how your message is.
But they are not listening. And that is why you're here with
me today to help simplify and amplify your beautiful message.
Thank you, You've summarized it beautiful.
I hope I am doing a good job, you know, in, in sending the
message of Katie, you know, in collaboration with AI to, to, to
the global population. Something right?
Like I'm listening, right? I hope they're listed.
Even the Bible says let them that have ears listen to what
the Spirit is saying. Amen to that.
You know, but, but you know, the, the what a beautiful way to
segue to, to the next question that I have for you.
And that is, how can organizations track that right
balance between automation and the human touch in terms of
customer experience? So the probability, let's start
at the end if you'd like. The probability is that these
days, because of what we've said before, many customers, in fact
most customers would be very happy with an automated level of
service if they can get that interaction managed quickly,
seamlessly, effortlessly to their satisfaction.
You know it's the easiest thing to do to go on to the chat bot
to to hunt down the information, but it has to be quick and easy
so actually my assumption is let's go with 80% right 8020
rule is always a good one. So let's assume that 80% of some
of the customer support. Let me put it that way,
interactions and even pre sales service interactions can be
accomplished if the technology is implemented well enough with
the customer in mind, with the customer engaged in the process
and so on and so forth. Now, that means that the amount
of time that it has now freed up the humans in the loop, the
humans in the loop offs customer service.
They can devote more time to solving the problems, the
opportunities that the challenges that customers have
in a very human 1 to 1 manner because we're never going to get
rid of that. And we shouldn't try to get rid
of that. But AI gives us the opportunity
to filter those that are much more transactional and get those
done in a much better automated manner using a bit more AI than
the the the the ones that you know, you inferred before that
the customer will always remember how you made them feel.
Uh huh. Yeah, not what exactly you did.
Right. And so for the most part, where
the interaction can be smooth and automated.
Love it. I love it.
It makes me feel good when I can interact and get my answer
quickly and get whatever done quickly, right?
But when I can't and I have to phone up or I have to press the
button to speak to an agent or whomever it is, I want that to
be quick. I want them to know everything
that I've said before. We want it to be highly
personalized, and the technology's there to be able to
do that. So there's no good reason,
There's no good excuse for not doing that.
But then I want to quickly get out of the, if you like AI
process and get to a human being and you've got to have a big,
let me put it this way, you've got to have a big red button on
the side that says Get Me Out and get me talking to a human
being. I'm telling you.
I about that, for goodness sake, let me just talk to somebody.
Right, exactly. I've experienced that several
times because you need personalized service and
sometimes these companies just impose the AI automated
questions that do not even relate to your, you know,
pinpoint at the time. And it is actually very
frustrating because sometimes your pinpoint is important and
it's urgent and you have those companies keep forcing you to,
to interact with the AI that is not even solving that unique
problem that you have at that time.
So it's very, very annoying. I love what you, you actually
suggested there. It's very important to be able
to have that option. Human beings love to have the
option, the agency right to be able to.
And, and you know, how foolish, how foolish of companies to
think, Oh, well, you know, we'll just upset a few customers and
that's fine, You know, because in this day and age of options,
a plethora of options, and the fact that, as you said earlier
on, we as human beings are often quite fickle, I have to hold up
my hand and say, well, I know I am.
Very sensitive. If I get poor service, I
immediately think, oh, I'm fed up with this, I want to go to a
different supplier. Exactly.
These days, technology enables me to do it very, very.
Quickly. Very quickly.
How foolish the organization
that thinks it can get away with just mediocre service and the
customer's going to put up with it.
The customer doesn't need to put up with it anymore anymore and
they're our competitors. Here's the other aspect for a
CEO C-Suite leader. Remember, there are competitors
that haven't yet come to market that are going to be AI first,
not even cloud first. They're going to be AI first
organizations. When they come to market from
left field, they will eat your market share at the drop of a
hat. If you are not paying attention
and serving exceptionally well. You will be out of business if
you don't serve your customer exceptionally well.
It's as simple as that because AI and cloud technologies and
great IT technologies enable us to do that these days.
Set up a business with very little expense.
Not like years gone by. Now you can set up a business
within a day, within hours, easily.
So more fool. The organization that thinks, Oh
well, the customer's not going to churn.
They're not going to go anywhere else.
They'll be OK with a mediocre level of technology enabled
service. They won't.
Trust me, they won't. That's that's a peak deletion,
right? Absolutely.
And deletion is not a good solution.
It's not. Yeah, it's, it's kind of
interesting what's happening in the landscape of professional
services and, you know, service delivery across various
industries. I did see a very disturbing, you
know, piece of news that brought a disturbing statistic and one,
one of the big professional services firms said to be caught
in one here in the UK. And I think the author was
talking about is this a function of automation or recession?
So I'd like for you to touch on that.
So what is the major cause of, you know, the job losses we
we're seeing right now, you know, in the US and the UK
economy? Do you think it's a function of
automation or? A function of recession I I
think is a bit of both, right. The reality is we know we're
still in fairly tight times. You know, costs are still going
up. People's, you know, living
expenses are, are being squeezed even more.
So organizations as well as consumers are being careful in
the money that they spend. So there is a financial need to
manage your costs very carefully at the moment.
At the same time as that there is the AI and automation
opportunity. And by the way, flip side of the
same coin, right, automation and AI, there's a lot of
organizations, a lot of leaders that think, oh, I need to do AI
for this and I need AI for that, when often what they need is
just a bit of good automation. Automation technology have been
around for years. You can do that without needing
to layer on the AI capability over the top of that.
If you've done automation well, big if.
If you've done automation well and you've got good data
structures and such like serving the systems and the processes
that serve your customers. Very true.
Then you. Can layer on the AI capability
over the top of that to tease out the intelligence that you've
never been able to do in the past because you've not been
able to mine huge amounts of data to spot trends and problems
and opportunities and challenges in the way we can do today.
So I think it's a bit of both. So I think there are some
industries therefore that will fall foul to the new AI
technologies and professional services.
Stroke consulting may well be one of those because you and I
can go on to the Chat GPTS or the, you know, Geminis or Co
pilots or anybody, any of the LLMS of the world.
And we can interact with the knowledge that seemingly is out
anywhere at everywhere. And we can draw on that
knowledge ourselves without necessarily needing third
parties, which historically we've needed to do the research
for it, put it all together in a strategy.
We can do that in minutes, minutes.
I mean, This is why it's so mind blowing.
The technology is phenomenal. It previously would take me not
even days and weeks, but months to do the research, compile it
all together, pair it with market trends, do some
benchmarking, put the strategy together that's based on my core
competencies, and actually come up with a way forward for my
business for the next 12 to 18 months.
Guess what? I can do that in half an hour
these days. Wow.
And my, my jaw is not a jaw. I mean it.
Genuinely, I'm blown away by some of this capability.
Door and the door. I love the cake you just baked
and I'm gonna add an icing to that cake.
You actually beautifully, you know, explained the, the, what I
say the relevance and the benefits of automation.
But the icing on the cake is automation actually also
enhances scalability or you know, businesses and my
business, you know, KDMS Consulting Limited, we are CFO
advisory firm and basically be our businesses to help
businesses, mind their business, you know, help them grow and we
grow. But the interesting thing is you
know, we deal with SM ES, we deal with startups.
We're basically in that business of helping you start up, scale
up and sell out. And that is what organizations
need to do in this stage in time.
Start up, you scale up and you sell out.
You know, and when you're managing your business, it's
very important to realize that revenue is vanity, profit is
sanity, and cash is king. And if you wish, you can say
cash is reality. These studies the date.
Exactly, you know, and automation is very, very
integral to to the heart of the businesses that will succeed
absolutely. And going into the future, you
know, but I would ask you that what you know, you, you are the
pro. I am the Joe because you've got
35 plus years of experience. And I'm not even up to 35 years
old right now. I'm just 33 years old, you know.
Be 33 again. No way, you know with.
All the opportunity available to you, right?
Well, it's fantastic. Great opportunities.
I love you. You know, we know you're a very,
very busy man and you would need to, you know, run off to your
next meeting soon. But before you run, you know,
they say a, a gold, a gold feast has no hide in place.
You know, you can run, but you cannot hide.
So my, my last question to you before I push you through the
round of fire. And of course, before we set up
our, our Part 2 for, you know, this very, very fantastic
episode. And of course, you know,
congratulations to you and myself for these beautiful
conversation we've had and the milestone episode 100.
Yeah. Just a 100.
I think it's, it's just a really, really beautiful thing.
And for me, it's really lovely that it's we we've spoken a lot
about something that is dear to my heart, my initials and my, my
gospel AI, you know, what do you think have been the myths and
the mistakes around AI adoption that you've observed so far in
the global? Market One big one is that
organizations and leaders wait to see what happened, learn from
other people's mistakes. I think that's fallacy because
by the time you then decide, Oh well I better dip my toe into
the AI world, it's too late because your competitors will
have done it long before you. They will have tried and tested
and failed at some experiments, but they will have exceeded in
others and they will have gained competitive advantage.
Business and your market. And you run the risk of putting
yourself out of business if you don't jump in.
And frankly, with kind of both feet knowing that you're going
to learn some lessons, harsh lessons along the way.
But what you'll win at well will be phenomenal.
It's exponential. AI is an exponential growth
lever. It's as simple as that and for
for somebody to be overly cautious and risk averse now to
say no, I'm not going to do that.
We'll wait and see what you know Fred does next door.
Good luck with that. I don't be alive in two to five
years time. Good luck.
I'm sorry about that. It is.
And I say that from the perspective of, you know, I'm,
I'm working with organisations that are trying to bring AI in.
They're doing the right things. They may be struggling with how
quickly they can do it. But yeah, as you alluded to
before, right, you've been using AI.
I've been using AIAI, of course, is not new.
What's been new in the public mind is the large language
models. But AI has been around when I
was around at the big IT. I have been around.
There we are. But I, you know, we were
working, I was working at the IT software company in 2000 and
1617 when we were working on our machine learning and AI models.
So it's been around for at least a decade, and in fact, more than
that. It's just exactly, very, very
true. Generative AI.
I, I, I really love what you're saying.
I really, really love what you're saying because I tell
people way back in 2018 while I was on PwC, we were using AI
already. So when you see me very, very
friendly with AI and you surprised them, like, excuse me,
we've been using this thing, you know, for decades now.
Like you just tell me you just came to the knowledge of it.
Yeah. So I think that the.
I just coming on. It's a really RIM, and I would
really urge any of your listeners not to wait, whether
they're small, medium size or large.
Don't wait to employ AI capabilities, technologies,
tools, but there's the big but. Use expert advisors to help
guide you through that process. And the process for me says it's
not about the technology. We'll get the technology.
Trust me, we will because everything runs on the
technology. But stay focused on what you're
trying to achieve, your business outcomes, the value you provide
to your customers. And we'll work back from there.
And then we'll bring in automation technology, AI
technology, all the right things for the right reasons that will
give you the right results at the right time.
It's simple. There it is.
Simple as ABC and the ABC of communication is be accurate, be
brief and be concise. And of course, you have actually
hit the nail on the on the head. So, but one thing I really
appreciate that you spoke about was businesses early adopting
AI, you know, testing and failing and testing till you
find the right, you know, AI tools, AI capabilities.
And that is something I've done with this podcast.
You know, I've used two different tools, you know,
before achieving the right set of tools and combinations to
utilize. You can go back to episode 1,
look at the journey up onto episode 100.
And you know, I'm grateful for what we've been able to
accomplish. And I'm also very, very grateful
for for your time today. You know, they say an attitude
of gratitude is good attitude. And when somebody shares their
time with you, they share their life with you because the Sr.
unit for measuring life this time.
Without further ado, I know you have to run away shortly.
I'm going to put you through the Pacific Ring of Fire because I
know that I know a little bit about your, your, your origin,
right, your heritage. And of course you are from
somewhere that is close to the Pacific Ring of Fire youth from
Soviet that is around the Indian Ocean and the Pacific Ocean.
So let me let me brought you through 5 quick questions.
Just tell me what comes to your mind real quick and #1 what's
the best book you've read on leadership or innovation?
I would go back a few years to when Daniel Goldman first
broached the notion of emotional intelligence and his book, his
first book on emotional intelligence was mind blowing
and for leadership, I think it was a defining moment for
leadership. I like that.
I would endeavor to add that resource to to the show notes so
our our audience are able to benefit from that.
So #2 AI or Human Torch. If you had to pick only one for
service excellence, what would you pick?
I'd never pick only one. It has.
It has to be both We. We want a strong army here, so
we'll go with war on that. I'm going to go with AI and the
reason I did that is because. Because AI is with you here,
that is the reason why. How could I forget?
The reality is that percent of interaction can be done very,
very well by AI. OK #3 the biggest misconception
people have about customer service.
That customer experience can be delivered to by an organization.
Only customer service can be delivered.
Interesting #4 What's 1 daily habit that helps you stay ahead
of the curve? I pray every morning.
I love. That amount of faith libacies.
Watch and pray and of course, have you seen a man diligent in
his work? He says time before kings and
not me a man. I love that.
So final question finish this sentence.
Great service starts with dash. What is dash?
Hey, Speaking of great people, thank you very much for being
great and of course being a great person and being on the
podcast today. My final call to action would be
for people to, you know, take advantage of your free webinar
and customer service revolutionizer framework of via
www.service-revolution.com. So that is going to be in the
show notes as well. So before you go, do you have
anyone to give a shout out to you?
And of course, kindly encourage the audience to please share,
like subscribe, do the needful. I am working very, very hard to
bring in great people like Juan Diaz.
Please let's at the work go to meet the people that need it.
So over to you, Juan. Adamato, thanks very much for
the conversation. I've enjoyed it enormously.
We clearly share a passion for inspiring others and educating
others and offering them our our experience, right, because we
stand on the shoulders of those who've gone before us.
And As for human rights, we need to continue to learn.
So I'm happy to be with you and to share the conversation.
Thank you very much for the time.
And of course, thank you very much once again, and of course,
love and respect to you. God bless you Sir and of course
till you guys see me again, look after yourselves and do the
needful. Go share, like, subscribe, and
I'll be in your faces again soon.